Each week, Front Row Boston’s staff gives you our Short List: the bands and musicians in and around town we think you should hear.

It would be tempting to connect Songhoy Blues’ sound to classic Malian singers like Ali Farka Touré, or the duo Amadou and Mariam. Those influences are there. But more remarkably, Songhoy Blues rock a blues punk style with driving guitars and dry melismatic vocals. They’re in town as part of the World Music/CRASHarts series with what we can tell is their first stop in Boston. Though we hope they’ll be in town a lot more, catch them Saturday just in case. Local band the Heavies open with a gritty take on blues and rockabilly.

Front Row Boston’s resident punk, Christine Champ, has a Song You Should Know coming up this week on Citizen’s grinding industrial grunge track, “Stain.” And if this tune along with the bulk of the band’s latest effort, Everybody Is Going to Heaven, is any indication, we’re in for a heavy evening Sunday night at the Paradise. It’s a change of pace from the band’s earlier emo-laden sound. Citizen plays with Turnover, Sorority Noise, and Milk Teeth.

10 String Symphony is a richly talented duo out of the Nashville country scene. Rachel Baiman and Christian Sedelmyer play five-string fiddles, and the haunting drones of that instrument draw a specter of Americana looming under the duo’s ethereal vocals. Gritty, yet ephemeral, 10 String Symphony should fill the intimate space of Club Passim with a delicate and evocative sound only hinted at on their latest release, Weight of the World.

Eric Bachmann has lived a few musical lives. As the front man for Archers of Loaf and Crooked Fingers, he developed a quintessential post-punk 90s rock aesthetic and then turned toward a brooding Americana, reflecting his peripatetic lifestyle. On Thursday evening, he comes to town bringing a well-received eponymous solo project with him. Special guest Andrew St. James rounds out the evening’s program.

Since the release of I Love You, Honeybear, the former Josh Tillman’s career has dawned in ways few might have imagined after the nombrilism of his first few solo records. He has expanded his palette stylistically, and instead of a solipsistic navel-gazing, Father John Misty has turned his focus elsewhere — to his wife, to his peers, to his generation. As listeners, we’re the better for it. Tess & Dave support.